China’s Blood-Stained Property Map

China’s property sector, with its forced evictions and sometimes bloody confrontations, has long been described as something akin to a war zone. Now a team of online volunteers, led by an anonymous Chinese blogger, has launched a map-based project that brings that simile into stark relief.

Called “the Blood-Stained Housing Map,” the project uses Google Maps to plot violent housing evictions and land grabs across the country. The result bears an eerie, and sobering, resemblance to the Guardian’s own Google Maps chart showing deaths recorded in the Wikileaks Iraq war logs.

Google Maps

Blood-Stained Housing Map, revised version

The project actually consists of two maps: a “revised” version edited by the founder that shows only verified cases (above), and an “open” version [] that anyone can add to or edit.

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A graphic Wikipedia of land-grab thuggery, the open version, which launched Oct. 8, has so far attracted more than 340,000 views and just over 90 contributions (below). Users have used a variety of icons to delineate different types of property-related violence: Volcanoes for mass protests, beds for when property owners were killed, and flames for when those resisting eviction lit themselves on fire. (Other icons appear to have been randomly selected.)

Google Maps

Blood-Stained Housing Map, open version

Contacted by China Real Time, the founder of the project (who refers to himself online as BloodyMap) said he wasn’t prepared to speak with foreign media. But in an interview (in Chinese) with the Beijing Times yesterday, he explained he started the map to raise consciousness about the bloodshed and convince prospective homebuyers to boycott developers who employ violence.

“We’re grass-roots. We’re consumers. All we can do is start from there and do what we can,” he told the paper. “As consumers, we could choose to buy or not buy.”

Conflicts between government-backed real-estate developers and Chinese homeowners have intensified in lockstep with the property market’s furious growth. As prices skyrocket, fewer and fewer residents are willing to move in exchange for the paltry compensation developers typically offer. Backed by local officials hungry for extra tax revenue, developers typically respond with a mixture of cajoling and threats. Too often, the resulting stand-offs end in violence.

In one of the most recent cases – dutifully marked on the map with a fire icon – two brothers in Jiangxi Province climbed to the roof of their home an lit themselves on fire [http://www.zonaeuropa.com/201009a.brief.htm ] with gasoline after their daughters were detained by police on the way to protest the family’s imminent eviction.

Civic-minded maps have managed to make an impact in China before. A water pollution map compiled by environmental activist Ma Jun has become a go-to resource for researching the country’s water issues, credited with helping authorities crack down on a number of polluting factories.

How long will the Blood-Stained Property Map last? Or, rather, how long will people in China be allowed to see it?

Like the water pollution map, the housing conflict map dovetails, in some ways, with central government policy. Concerned about the impact of skyrocketing real estate prices on social stability, Beijing has recently raised interest rates and passed a raft of regulations in an effort to cool the market and rein in developers.

But property developers, many of them state-owned, are a powerful voice in Beijing. And the government has always been wary of any open-source project gaining too much attention.

Since the project is hosted on the global version of Google’s map service – which, unlike the newly launched Map World, is hosted outside mainland China — the government wouldn’t be able to take it down entirely. Censors could, however, block users in China from seeing it.

As online response makes clear, the map has struck a deep vein of frustration.

“Houses stained with blood and tears – I hate GDP!” a reader at the popular Netease news portal wrote in a comment that by last night had earned more than 2,400 votes of support.

Not everyone is optimistic that the map will have the desired effect. In a commentary (in Chinese), blogger and newspaper columnist Hu Jinliang described the map as a “one-time spontaneous act of catharsis” and cast doubt on its ability to lessen the brutality of the way housing gets built in China.

“It has a strong visual and spiritual impact,” he wrote, but it “can’t do anything to affect the impulsiveness and greed of the people who benefit [from land grabs].”

If that turns out to be the case, the project’s founder has another use in mind for the map.

“If there is ever a day when we don’t have violent demolition,” BloodyMap said in the Beijing Times interview, the map “can be there to tell younger generations that there was once a time when things were developing quickly and that some people paid a price for it.”

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